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If you enjoyed playing kung-fu games then you’ll love this one. It’s best described as a kung-fu arcade adventure in which you play a highly skilled mercenary. Your latest job is for a bunch of revolutionaries who want you to infiltrate a central security office and steal a floppy disk containing a list of rebel leaders before the information is transmitted throughout the country.

You arrive by dinghy at a wharf by a warehouse which is the location of the disguised security office. Ahead of you lie an underground complex of 118 complete with two underground trains.

You’ll need all your kung-fu and weapon skills if you are to survive the rooms packed with armed guards, laser firing video cameras and vicious guard dogs.

You enter a warehouse holding only a shuriken (a pointed throwing weapon) with only 90 minutes (game time) to reach the computer room and find the disk.

Although you can stop and fight the various guards the key task that you are paid to do is to get the disk. You do get some cash for fighting and killing guards as you go as you go through the game via a paid-as-you-kill scheme but you get nothing for harming dogs.

It is important to keep the dollars rolling in as these represent your score in the game. Killing a guard with a kung-fu blow nets you $500 where as killing with a weapon gets you only $100. Naturally using a weapon is easier and quicker but each one can only be thrown once. Luckily you can find other objects ranging from knives to bricks which flash in the “Near” box on the bottom left of your screen display. A quick jab of the joystick and it’s in your sticky hands.

Unfortunately you can only hold one object at a time to leave your hands free for all the kung-fu blows. This creates a problem for you on the way out since if you’re holding the disk you can’t use any weapons.

Once you’ve creamed a few guards and tamed a few dogs you’re ready for a full challenge that brings a tidy profit of $10,000. All this entails is finding a bomb in the warehouse and swapping it for the disk setting it to explode. Get out safely and the money is yours. This should only be attempted by skilled saboteurs as carrying the bomb to the computer room cuts down your weapon use even more and once you’ve swapped it for the disk, sets you another time limit in which you must escape.

Escape is via a patient helicopter which hangs around waiting for you. If I had my way I’d pay the pilot to land and give me some help inside the warehouse.

Saboteur Spectrum is an exceptional game that takes the kung-fu game a stage further to perfection.